Google to Blow Minds With Facebook Rival ‘Maka-Maka’

Visitors look at an information screen at the Google Book Search stand at the International Frankfurt Book Fair 'Frankfurter Buchmesse' in Frankfurt, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 11, 2007. The world's largest... (Associated Press)

(Newser)
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Google is set to launch its hush-hush rival to Facebook next month. Code-named “Maka-Maka,” the watershed social networking service will introduce a completely open source platform and a slew of new applications. Details are scarce, but the vision is a social layer that combines all of Google’s existing services—think GoogleChat, iGoogle, Orkut—and incorporates outside data, TechCrunch reports.

The grand Maka-Maka plan won’t come out all at once, and the first peek, expected sometime next week, will only try to match its competitors. The potentially Facebook-killing applications—which make piles of Google data available to outside developers and allow importing of Friendster, Twitter, or Digg information—won’t be unleashed on unwitting consumers quite yet. (Read more Google stories.)